This paper examines the discourses that students draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first‐year engineering foundation programme. It looks at the way 'rural' is often constructed as 'lack' and therefore 'other', the dangers of constructing development as linear, the ways nostalgia and utopianism feed into discourses of development and how 'propriety' serves to maintain boundaries between nature and people, society and individuals. Different modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom, may enable alternate discourses to emerge or to be suppressed. This paper argues that the curriculum needs to engage with students' views in order to understand, interrogate and critique the kinds of realities they feed into.
Reference:
Archer, A. 2009. Invisible landscapes: Students constructions of the social and the natural in an engineering course in South Africa. Social Dynamics.
Archer, A. (2009). Invisible landscapes: Students constructions of the social and the natural in an engineering course in South Africa. Social Dynamics, http://hdl.handle.net/11427/3348
Archer, Arlene "Invisible landscapes: Students constructions of the social and the natural in an engineering course in South Africa." Social Dynamics (2009) http://hdl.handle.net/11427/3348
Archer A. Invisible landscapes: Students constructions of the social and the natural in an engineering course in South Africa. Social Dynamics. 2009; http://hdl.handle.net/11427/3348.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social Dynamics on 3 August 2009, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02533950903076220.
